July 28, 2008

Hulu video site still looking good

When last we checked in with Hulu, the online video-serving site from the parent companies of NBC and Fox, it was still in beta but already impressive.

The site felt as if it was dealing in one main theme: Make it enjoyable for people to watch video, mostly a rich library of popular TV shows, online.

Some nine months later, now that it has been out in the real world for much of this year, this most prominent experiment in putting professionally made video online seems worth revisiting, especially in light of a new study that claims the average viewership of Hulu (hulu.com) is just 32 years old and that, unlike traditional TV, it skews heavily male.

Young men are thought to be the disappearing demographic when it comes to old-fashioned TV, which by now includes cable. So if any meaningful percentage of them are actually being lured to a different form of TV, that's big news.

At the same time, the study said, 15 percent of online Americans have heard of Hulu, which the news outlet reporting on the study, TVWeek, cast as a low figure but strikes me as high enough to be unlikely.

In the fragmented, constantly self-refreshing world of the Web, 15 percent is practically a supermajority. Fortunes are made on fragments of a percent, and the battle isn't so much to be good as it is to be noticed.

Certainly, there is reason enough to be skeptical of the study: It doesn't include any of the all-important raw user numbers (10 million men older than 50 would be worth a lot more than 500,000 in their 20s).

So let's take the data with a few grains of salt. As the site battles to get word of its existence into the mainstream, the most important thing remains the user experience. Web sites mostly get just one shot from visitors, and Hulu, which wants to be a destination site, needs to deliver immediately.

Deliver, it does. Scores of popular shows are available, including all of "The Office" from last season, and, saving you $50 or so in DVD costs, the entire three seasons of the late, great Fox comedy "Arrested Development."

You know how the Comedy Central parent, Viacom, is suing YouTube right now over alleged copyright infringement? Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," two of the biggest bones of contention between the parties, are up on Hulu now. For the price of watching a short ad, you can call up the most recent eight episodes (although the fact that there's a public-service ad, rather than a real one, attached to a recent "Daily Show" suggests the number of viewers remains small).

There are dramas galore, too, and even lots of movies, all ad-supported.

It almost feels like too much material to be available so cheap, the kind of thing—like an absurdly low Web-site price on a laptop—that you ought to take advantage of now before the terms change dramatically.

Plus, Hulu just gets the viewing experience right. Watch in a pop-out window, watch in full screen or with the computer screen around the viewing screen cast in a non-distracting gray. Embed it in your blog or cut a clip and send it to a friend or to Facebook. The quality, too, is good, a reported 480p (not officially high-definition, but at least enhanced-definition, or better than standard TV).

It's enough to make a viewer—even a viewer outside of that coveted male-in-his-20s demographic—think that this could well be one of the more prominent futures of online video, of television, of the way we entertain ourselves. The caveats are that people have to find it and, if they do, the site's programmers have to figure out how to make it pay the bills.

Comments

One of the best features about Hulu is the ability to "subscribe" to shows, meaning that new episodes are automatically added to your personal queue of saved episodes to watch. The ad breaks are so short in comparison to regular TV that I am much more likely to watch them all the way through rather than taking a kitchen or bathroom break. And since I do not own a TV, my viewership online is not cannibalizing from the network broadcasts.

Hulu is like a banquet, a little drama, a little scifi and before you know it you have a very nice viewing experience. The ads are so short you don't have time to leave for the john etc. I rate this site very high and worth checking out.